Regardless of your feelings of penile circumcision, let’s avoid actively spreading blatant misinformation.
It’s not the sole (nor even a) reason Americans currently perform circumcision; there are medical considerations (such as the complete removal of penile cancer risk) that are the primary motivators and defenses.
That’s not me saying those benefits outweigh any other considerations (nor me making any defense of circumcision, etc.) but masturbation habits are not even a remote consideration and to state otherwise is just blatant and overt misinfo.
I mean, removing the breasts or colon would also prevent breast or colon cancer, which are much more prevalent.
I actually hear about other penis diseases a lot more when people defend circumcision. And in any case, it’s more of a cultural thing, and the justifications are retroactive.
(such as the complete removal of penile cancer risk)
Unless the circumcision actually cut of the glans as well as the prepuce, no, you’re not gonna completely avoid risk, since some of the cases start from the glans, even keratinised ones. True, it’s quite a reduction, but it’s not “complete removal of the risk” that’s just misinformation. Also, you can make sure you don’t get cancer on your limbs if you amputate them! (Wouldn’t really be enough for me to get rid of completely functional parts of my body just in case.)
Cool, man; that’s so besides the point of the conversation that I have to assume you just want to have your own one.
My only point was that “reduces masturbation” is not a modern justification that near to any human on Earth is currently using (and especially not any doctor) and, apparently, it’s not as common knowledge as I presumed that there’s an entire body of medical work on the subject that’s the actual basis people use as justification.
I thought people would rather spend their time countering that body of medical work as telling a doctor or any medical organization “you’re just trying to stop masturbating” is definitely not going to get them to take you seriously but I guess that was a grain of specificity too much for Lemmy to handle and you’d rather focus on the original justification that will definitely have no impact or relevance to why it’s still currently in practice.
You’re in denial. The anti-masturbation craze is known to have been a major motivation for pretty much all this research. It’s well documented.
And just like, you can’t argue 100% reduction of penile cancer, when that’s just simply literally really not true. So why claim it?
It has been widely accepted by medical historians since the 1950s that discouraging masturbation was a major reason why doctors, educationists and childcare experts sought to introduce widespread circumcision of both boys and girls in the nineteenth century, a campaign which was successful in the former case, unsuccessful in the latter–an outcome which still colours popular concepts about what constitutes genital mutilation. A result of the partial character of this victory has been a high degree of blindness on the issue: while the treatment of hysteria and masturbation in women by clitoridectomy was noticed early on (and condemned with indignation), the comparable operation on boys (amputation of the foreskin) has been either ignored or given only fleeting attention, and has rarely been regarded with the same degree of abhorrence.
The point isn’t that anyone is directly arguing today that there’s a strong anti-masturbatory movement atm. But historically that has been the motivation, and we can quite clearly see how most of the medical research into the subject was done because someone wanted smarter arguments than fanatic anti-masturbatory moral panic.
And these aren’t all from a lifetime ago.
The sceptical mood and anti-puritanism of the 1960s found expression in Alex Comfort’s light-hearted but reliable survey of medical manias, The anxiety makers (1967). “curious preoccupations of the profession” he listed the crusade for continence, an obsession with constipation, hostility to drinking tea, moralistic theories of venereal disease and the campaign against self-abuse
So yeah there’s definitely people still using the reasoning. Hopefully all the doctors who used it are all retired, but some are definitely still alive.
You’re in denial. The anti-masturbation craze is known to have been a major motivation for pretty much all this research. It’s well documented.
Y’know, – it’s a curious thing – that might be why I’ve never once denied it, in any of my comments? But I’m interrupting the conversation you’d rather be having, again.
The original motivation for the trend is not the current defense for the trend which is the actual thing I was pointing out (and have kept pointing out; your argument that no one is saying there is a strong antimasturbatory movement is ignoring that the comment I was responding to said it was still the motivating reason for the trend, to this day. And a lot of the medical body of research is still within the last 50 years; that paper I linked to in another comment was not an ancient study. Again, – if you actually want to address the current state of the world – you need to acknowledge it).
But I’ll let you return to your other conversation.
You said its not a modern reasoning. 20th century is considered to be modernity, and pretty sure there are still doctors alive who worked in the 60s. So even if you’re using “modern” in another context, there are still people who’ve been taught using that reasoning, and since most of the reasoning in the US today is contested as well, we can easily argue it’s about moral panic and conforming to societal standards more than about actual factual objective medical benefits.
You’re still just straight up wrong about “removing all risk of penile cancer”, yet you won’t admit that.
Sure, it significantly reduces the chances of getting penile cancer, but unless you chop of the glans, it doesn’t remove it.
It also significantly alters the sensation in your penis and as far as American media is to be believed, makes jerking off “dry” much more difficult. Can’t imagine needing accessories for getting myself off lol. I mean, I have used accessories ofc, but I couldn’t imagine not being able to get off without them. Always having to have a bottle of lube just in case I get horny and want to rub my keratinised stem which lacks the prepuce and glans, (so that I won’t have even a tiny risk of cancer.)
You said its not a modern reasoning. 20th century is considered to be modernity, and pretty sure there are still doctors alive who worked in the 60s
I think you misread your own quote; what you quoted was not that doctors were still using that as the recommendation in the '60s but an allusion to a book regarding (to quote) “medical manias”, The Anxiety Makers; every example from the book that your source quotes is from the 19th century: “Following Spitz and Hare, Comfort observed that punitive treatments for the vice introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century included[…]”
we can easily argue it’s about moral panic and conforming to societal standards more than about actual factual objective medical benefits
Except the first part would be speculative and not based upon any actual evidence; regardless the reasons parents do it, it is absurd to act like doctors and entire medical org.s are recommending…just because (even if their evidence for the recommendation is poor). My mother was a registered nurse: they have reasons they believe it should be offered within a medical setting and providing your own justifications for their motivations will not actually address why they are acting as they are; this is why – even if it agrees with our side – misinformation is bad as it paints our understanding of things on bad assumptions. Again, I would think we’d actually want to address why these decisions are greenlit rather than just feel smug that we know better but that’s, apparently, too fine-grained a distinction.
You’re still just straight up wrong about “removing all risk of penile cancer”, yet you won’t admit that.
Because that was never the conversation, bud; and you still think this is a discussion about the efficacy of circumcision, apparently.
It was slight hyperbole but that’s because I don’t actually care about the details (as I said elsewhere, penile cancer is so rare as to make the former point – even if it were true – moot); the point was to refer to some of the medical information out there to draw attention to it because the original point of the conversation was that someone said the current reason for circumcision is antimasturbitory policy; which, again, is not true.
I’m not trying to cite that information in detail because it’s only related to the main point that antimasturbitory policy is not the current defense for the practice. I’m not making an argument for circumcision; that is not the conversation.
I’ll let you get back to the conversation you’d rather have where you describe your masturbation practices.
Nope, didn’t read it wrong at all. Purposefully left out bits to check out whether you actually even look at it.
Because that was never the conversation
So still just ashamed to say “I was mistaken” or “well that wasn’t entirely true, I exaggerated a bit on purpose to make my point seem better”, huh?
It was slight hyperbole
Hahahaha “100% reduction” was "slight hyperbole? Bwahaha.
I’m not trying to cite that information in detail
That’s pretty clear yeah. But you’re just wrong.
For example, as late as 1970, a widely used textbook, Campbell’s Urology, recognized circumcision as a way to AVERT MASTURBATION. According to numerous scholars, the nineteenth century obsession with masturbation, and anxieties about male sexuality more generally, forms an important backdrop to the mainstreaming of circumcision within medicine.
Routine circumcision of infants got a boost in the US from pediatrician Benjamin Spock, whose popular book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1945, endorsed circumcision. Spock stated that he thought circumcision was a good idea, especially if most of a person’s peers were circumcised, because that makes a person feel socially regular. Pediatrician Sorrells explains that Spock reversed course in 1989 and became firmly opposed to circumcision, but by then his views had already left their mark. In the US, circumcision of newborn males became almost universal by the late 1960s, with rates in some parts of the country exceeding ninety percent. Hodges makes the point that by the 1990s, the majority of US doctors had never even seen a human penis with its foreskin intact. Even in textbooks, US doctors were likely to encounter images of penises where the foreskin is either absent fully or incompletely covering the glans. In fact, the only time a US doctor would see an image of a penis fully covered by a foreskin is in images that depict so-called phimosis. According to Hodges, as a result of cultural biases, many of the images of phimosis found in the US medical literature would appear normal to Europeans viewing the same images.
Again, I’m not arguing that’s good reasoning (especially considering that penile cancer is generally rare) but I don’t think it makes any more sense to not address the actual reasons people are doing circumcision for.
Again, I’m not arguing that’s good reasoning (especially considering that penile cancer is generally rare) but I don’t think it makes any more sense to not address the actual reasons people are doing circumcision for.
The actual reason most people in the US do circumcision is because it’s been normalized to do (and offer unprompted, by hospitals), nothing more.
Regardless, it’s certainly not “because it reduces masturbation”.
Don’t pretend like antimasturbatory logic wasn’t a massive drive behind the force to set up the US as the only supposedly “developed” nation with this horrid practice.
The concept of circumcision as a preventive, and then routine, procedure emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, though the reasons for this development remain contested. In a recent historical survey, Dunsmuir and Gordon cite prevention or cure of impotence, phimosis, sterility, priapism, masturbation, venereal disease, epilepsy, bed-wetting, night terrors, “precocious sexual unrest” and homosexuality as among the contradictory benefits urged by Victorian and Edwardian physicians in Britain and the USA, without offering any firm suggestions of their own as to the relative weight of these factors.
100% it’s inherited from the USA during their reconstruction period after the split. Circumcision was encouraged by the US military as a way to make soldiers more efficient, and since SK never lost the threat of NK invasion, it became a cultural practice in the 50s that never ended. Today, it’s a full blown cultural norm like in the US, probably >80% of men (interestingly, neonatal circumcision is not the norm, and many men will choose for themselves later); in the US, the rate varies by region, and is overall declining outside of Michigan and the Midwest (which have growing Muslim populations, and are becoming more and more sex-negative overall).
I’ll grant you that “sole” was a little hyperbole, but It is a practice that started between the 19th and 20th century that was absolutely started by Kellogg. Practiced almost exclusively by Protestants that have zero history of doing it before then, and do it now to keep their children from masturbating. I really would like you to list some other reasons almost exclusively Protestants do something they have no history of, and started doing it around the Time when Kellogg was contemporary. He was a Seventh Day Adventist who achieved to a “revivalist” reinterpretation of Christian Scripture.
Penile cancer rates in newborns is so close to non existent that it is a very poor excuse. The hardening of the foreskin is something that is usually treated at the time the condition pops up, and most doctors recommend non surgical treatments.
And finally the one poor excuse commonly cited about hygiene is just fucking dumb. The rest of the world manages to not let their dicks fall off from gangrene, why are kids in America so susceptible?
I know you said your not defending it, but you are sugar-coating it so hard that it reads like you are.
You can’t get cancer if that part is removed. If it’s about cancer, let the boy decide for himself at 18. There’s zero reason to take that choice away from them on the grounds of penile cancer in old age.
Sure; again, I’m not arguing on either side for the issue. I’m just pointing out what’s not the actual argument people do or don’t make for the practice.
Super fair 🙂 I’m a former cancer researcher, so I like to chime in on cancer misconceptions haha. But yes, I’m absolutely against circumcision of minors, and circumcision misinformation, so I also come in there as well.
Regardless of your feelings of penile circumcision, let’s avoid actively spreading blatant misinformation.
It’s not the sole (nor even a) reason Americans currently perform circumcision; there are medical considerations (such as the complete removal of penile cancer risk) that are the primary motivators and defenses.
That’s not me saying those benefits outweigh any other considerations (nor me making any defense of circumcision, etc.) but masturbation habits are not even a remote consideration and to state otherwise is just blatant and overt misinfo.
I mean, removing the breasts or colon would also prevent breast or colon cancer, which are much more prevalent.
I actually hear about other penis diseases a lot more when people defend circumcision. And in any case, it’s more of a cultural thing, and the justifications are retroactive.
Unless the circumcision actually cut of the glans as well as the prepuce, no, you’re not gonna completely avoid risk, since some of the cases start from the glans, even keratinised ones. True, it’s quite a reduction, but it’s not “complete removal of the risk” that’s just misinformation. Also, you can make sure you don’t get cancer on your limbs if you amputate them! (Wouldn’t really be enough for me to get rid of completely functional parts of my body just in case.)
Cool, man; that’s so besides the point of the conversation that I have to assume you just want to have your own one.
My only point was that “reduces masturbation” is not a modern justification that near to any human on Earth is currently using (and especially not any doctor) and, apparently, it’s not as common knowledge as I presumed that there’s an entire body of medical work on the subject that’s the actual basis people use as justification.
I thought people would rather spend their time countering that body of medical work as telling a doctor or any medical organization “you’re just trying to stop masturbating” is definitely not going to get them to take you seriously but I guess that was a grain of specificity too much for Lemmy to handle and you’d rather focus on the original justification that will definitely have no impact or relevance to why it’s still currently in practice.
You’re in denial. The anti-masturbation craze is known to have been a major motivation for pretty much all this research. It’s well documented.
And just like, you can’t argue 100% reduction of penile cancer, when that’s just simply literally really not true. So why claim it?
The point isn’t that anyone is directly arguing today that there’s a strong anti-masturbatory movement atm. But historically that has been the motivation, and we can quite clearly see how most of the medical research into the subject was done because someone wanted smarter arguments than fanatic anti-masturbatory moral panic.
And these aren’t all from a lifetime ago.
So yeah there’s definitely people still using the reasoning. Hopefully all the doctors who used it are all retired, but some are definitely still alive.
Y’know, – it’s a curious thing – that might be why I’ve never once denied it, in any of my comments? But I’m interrupting the conversation you’d rather be having, again.
The original motivation for the trend is not the current defense for the trend which is the actual thing I was pointing out (and have kept pointing out; your argument that no one is saying there is a strong antimasturbatory movement is ignoring that the comment I was responding to said it was still the motivating reason for the trend, to this day. And a lot of the medical body of research is still within the last 50 years; that paper I linked to in another comment was not an ancient study. Again, – if you actually want to address the current state of the world – you need to acknowledge it).
But I’ll let you return to your other conversation.
You said its not a modern reasoning. 20th century is considered to be modernity, and pretty sure there are still doctors alive who worked in the 60s. So even if you’re using “modern” in another context, there are still people who’ve been taught using that reasoning, and since most of the reasoning in the US today is contested as well, we can easily argue it’s about moral panic and conforming to societal standards more than about actual factual objective medical benefits.
You’re still just straight up wrong about “removing all risk of penile cancer”, yet you won’t admit that.
Sure, it significantly reduces the chances of getting penile cancer, but unless you chop of the glans, it doesn’t remove it.
It also significantly alters the sensation in your penis and as far as American media is to be believed, makes jerking off “dry” much more difficult. Can’t imagine needing accessories for getting myself off lol. I mean, I have used accessories ofc, but I couldn’t imagine not being able to get off without them. Always having to have a bottle of lube just in case I get horny and want to rub my keratinised stem which lacks the prepuce and glans, (so that I won’t have even a tiny risk of cancer.)
I think you misread your own quote; what you quoted was not that doctors were still using that as the recommendation in the '60s but an allusion to a book regarding (to quote) “medical manias”, The Anxiety Makers; every example from the book that your source quotes is from the 19th century: “Following Spitz and Hare, Comfort observed that punitive treatments for the vice introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century included[…]”
Except the first part would be speculative and not based upon any actual evidence; regardless the reasons parents do it, it is absurd to act like doctors and entire medical org.s are recommending…just because (even if their evidence for the recommendation is poor). My mother was a registered nurse: they have reasons they believe it should be offered within a medical setting and providing your own justifications for their motivations will not actually address why they are acting as they are; this is why – even if it agrees with our side – misinformation is bad as it paints our understanding of things on bad assumptions. Again, I would think we’d actually want to address why these decisions are greenlit rather than just feel smug that we know better but that’s, apparently, too fine-grained a distinction.
Because that was never the conversation, bud; and you still think this is a discussion about the efficacy of circumcision, apparently.
It was slight hyperbole but that’s because I don’t actually care about the details (as I said elsewhere, penile cancer is so rare as to make the former point – even if it were true – moot); the point was to refer to some of the medical information out there to draw attention to it because the original point of the conversation was that someone said the current reason for circumcision is antimasturbitory policy; which, again, is not true.
I’m not trying to cite that information in detail because it’s only related to the main point that antimasturbitory policy is not the current defense for the practice. I’m not making an argument for circumcision; that is not the conversation.
I’ll let you get back to the conversation you’d rather have where you describe your masturbation practices.
Nope, didn’t read it wrong at all. Purposefully left out bits to check out whether you actually even look at it.
So still just ashamed to say “I was mistaken” or “well that wasn’t entirely true, I exaggerated a bit on purpose to make my point seem better”, huh?
Hahahaha “100% reduction” was "slight hyperbole? Bwahaha.
That’s pretty clear yeah. But you’re just wrong.
Or did I read that wrong somehow, hmm?
Oh, right the source
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/circumcision
What’s that “edu” mean in their address…? O.o
How would that make my point seem better? I’m not arguing for circumcision; but I guess that’s the conversation you want to have.
That’s a bold claim about curing cancer with no citation.
That’s because it takes two seconds to Google due to being the most commonly used defense for circumcision: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3139859/.
Again, I’m not arguing that’s good reasoning (especially considering that penile cancer is generally rare) but I don’t think it makes any more sense to not address the actual reasons people are doing circumcision for.
The actual reason most people in the US do circumcision is because it’s been normalized to do (and offer unprompted, by hospitals), nothing more.
True; I guess I was providing the answer to the follow-up question of “why is it offered by hospitals, unprompted”.
Regardless, it’s certainly not “because it reduces masturbation”.
Don’t pretend like antimasturbatory logic wasn’t a massive drive behind the force to set up the US as the only supposedly “developed” nation with this horrid practice.
https://www.cirp.org/library/history/darby4/
Korea as well unfortunately.
But probably not before the splitting?
Seems like South-Korea has some things which have quite clearly come quote directly from the US.
Like the whole loving spam thing. (The food, not the phenomenon.)
100% it’s inherited from the USA during their reconstruction period after the split. Circumcision was encouraged by the US military as a way to make soldiers more efficient, and since SK never lost the threat of NK invasion, it became a cultural practice in the 50s that never ended. Today, it’s a full blown cultural norm like in the US, probably >80% of men (interestingly, neonatal circumcision is not the norm, and many men will choose for themselves later); in the US, the rate varies by region, and is overall declining outside of Michigan and the Midwest (which have growing Muslim populations, and are becoming more and more sex-negative overall).
I’ll grant you that “sole” was a little hyperbole, but It is a practice that started between the 19th and 20th century that was absolutely started by Kellogg. Practiced almost exclusively by Protestants that have zero history of doing it before then, and do it now to keep their children from masturbating. I really would like you to list some other reasons almost exclusively Protestants do something they have no history of, and started doing it around the Time when Kellogg was contemporary. He was a Seventh Day Adventist who achieved to a “revivalist” reinterpretation of Christian Scripture.
Penile cancer rates in newborns is so close to non existent that it is a very poor excuse. The hardening of the foreskin is something that is usually treated at the time the condition pops up, and most doctors recommend non surgical treatments.
And finally the one poor excuse commonly cited about hygiene is just fucking dumb. The rest of the world manages to not let their dicks fall off from gangrene, why are kids in America so susceptible?
I know you said your not defending it, but you are sugar-coating it so hard that it reads like you are.
You can’t get cancer if that part is removed. If it’s about cancer, let the boy decide for himself at 18. There’s zero reason to take that choice away from them on the grounds of penile cancer in old age.
Sure; again, I’m not arguing on either side for the issue. I’m just pointing out what’s not the actual argument people do or don’t make for the practice.
Super fair 🙂 I’m a former cancer researcher, so I like to chime in on cancer misconceptions haha. But yes, I’m absolutely against circumcision of minors, and circumcision misinformation, so I also come in there as well.